iPassions

The new Flight Kitchen dedicated just for Emirates is now in full operation here in Dubai and has been since last week. Its a monster kitchen and supposedly the world’s largest Flight Kitchen built to capacity of 115,000 meals a day! The migration of Emirates operations from the old kitchen to the new kitchen was a mammoth task, although it was carried out in about 8 phase approach. Kudos to all those involved ! Like everything else, understandably , it would take at least a couple of months to get all operations smoothen up in the new kitchen and I guess, we may have to bear up with on and off minor hiccups and try & support them in any way we possibly can.

This afternoon we had our weekly meeting with EKFC in the Conference Room @ the new kitchen (EKFC1) and overall, the meeting went well. It seems, we have a shortage of meal trolleys to meet flight packing requirements and really cannot understand where the hell these meal trolleys are disappearing ? Some times in the recent past, we’ve been carrying out trolley counts both out and in and was stoppe, when everything seem going on well. I guess, absence of real time trolley count @ different locations around the world and/or lack or no visibility at all of building up of trolleys have made managing the meal trolleys even more challenging ! Bob mentioned the idea of ‘SALIK’ tags for trolleys; however, there appear some obstacles quoting ‘high costs’ to it. It is however, suprising that we are not making concentrated efforts pursue SALIK tags (RFID) methodology, when other areas such as Cargo has already introduced RFID tags to track ULDs and even Airport Services are cosnidering biometrics technology to further improve customer service !

Paris, March 28th,2007

I arrived here yesterday from Venice on Air France flight AF1127 operated with an Airbus 319. In Venice, we looked at one flight kitchen – in fact that’s the one and only Kitchen- operated by Servair Air Chef – a JV between Alpha Flight Services and Servair. After a long days work @ the Flight Kitchen, we still managed to do a quick tour around the city of Venice sourrended with beautiful canals. Stefan – our colleague guided the tour and I guess we walked about 5Km. On the way back, we had a ride on the water taxi to the Bus Stop. I’ll try and post a couple of pictures here later.

After arriving here in Paris, I went to the Flight Kitchen straight from the airport. Two of my collagues – Sandra and Reueben too arrived in the same afternoon from Dubai to work at the new catering unit for the start up. We had a meeting with the Flight Kitchen management to discuss and agree on our Agenda for the next few days, before we left for the hotel.

Today, we started work @ 0900hrs and things were moving very slowely. Our catering goods shipments were still being cleared and it took alomost the whole day to get the air freight shipments into the catering unit warehouse. However, the food presentation that we did for Menu Cycle B went on well and the food prepared by Chef Michel was nice and tasty. I had a good steak and really enjoyed it, as always! Sandra helped us to check translation of Stowage manual from English to French and I have to say, she did that fairly well BTW, we sorted out and arranged First and Business Class Table Linen and sent them to the external laundry contractor to prepare for the 1st flight. We called it a day at around 1900hrs and when we reached the hotel, we were all kind of tired ; so decided to get in to rooms and be on our own with room service dinner and early bed.

Here, I’m blogging again after about one and half months. I’ve really been busy, mostly traveling for work stuff. Since I my last post, I’ve been to Paris twice, to Australia and also to London. With all stringent security and stuff, air travel is no more fun. However, I have to say, tighten airport security is always well received for safety of all of us! So, I’ll be off to Venice tomorrow for a couple of days, before I fly to Paris on March 27th,2007 for catering contract transfer and start up with the new flight kitchen.

I’ll be on the go again starting tomorrow… meaning, I’ll be off to Paris for three days business trip. Well.. I guess, probably not the best time to travel to Europe with freezing cold and rather wet weather; however, you know how our business and industry like ? In getting prepared for the travel tomorrow,I’m still kind of wondering whether I should carry my new laptop ! As much as I would like to take it along with me, without really knowing whether I would be able to connect the machine to network with out any glitches (as I usually have experienced in the past during many of my travels) I feel, I would rather not take it. So, I’ve prepared my new loose leaf binder with all documents necessary in plastic clear folders and I have to say, it really looks professional – I’m happy ! I was originally scheduled to fly tomorrow morning, first to Frankfurt and then after a brief flight kitchen visit in Frankfurt, onward to Paris. However, last minute I had to cancel my brief visit to Frankfurt and schedule my flight to Paris direct tomorrow afternoon as I’ll have to meet my colleagues from IT tomorrow morning to catch up with our IT Projects Weekly Progress meeting we missed last Thursday. Oh, well… never mind !

If I remember right, I’m going to Paris after about year and half. I was there last in July 2005, when I transitted to Toulous to attend Airbus A380 UD Catering Working Group Meeting. Talking about Paris in the industry front, we have had quite a number issues concerning industrial action over the years and many times we had to double load catering on flights to avoid any inconvenience to our customers.

Before it slips out of my mind, I thought I must write some thing about an extra ordinary colleague of mine. He has been working in our company since its inception in 1985. In fact, it was quite recently during a business trip to Tunis that I found out he was a the  Flight Purser of one of the two very first flights of the airline on October the 21st, 1985. He has served on the flight from Dubai to Karachi on that day. Telling the story of that 1st flight, he said ” The give-aways on that flight were 24 carrot gold plated key rings and when I walked in the aircraft cabin to distribute give-aways, none of the passengers wanted them and they were refusing….” They didn’t want to accept these 24 carrot gold plated key rings as they were so afraid of their local airport customs that they would impound them on arrival..” He also shared with me about a dinner that him and another few first employees were invited by the Chief Executive of the company. In that dinner, the Chief Executive of the company, then has said about how the company’s route network would look like in the future, talking about all sorts of destinations like Colombo, Manila, Singapore, Hongkong, London, Paris, North America…. Looking at where we are now, as one of the world’s fastest growing airline, it is amazing, the vision of our Chief Executive during those early days, has now become a reality ! Most certainly, untiring efforts of all those who were part of those early days in setting up the vision and making things happen had contributed to the growth and success to the organization. In that, my colleague Ibrahim Issa has always been one of them. I have to say, it has been a privilege to being able to have him as a wonderful colleague and a friend! As I go along which would think a long one in writing and posting about my life and career, I hope to be able to write more stories from Ibrahim about the airline’s early days.